While the whole world has heard about Lee Rigby’s inhumane beheading on 22 May, only a handful of people are aware that Rigby’s decapitation was only one of several murders of this sort which took place in the UK in the past month. In the wake of a funeral service of Miss Reema Ramzan who was brutally beheaded on June 4th in Sheffield, Ian Kingsley, Professor Emeritus from Leeds University, told the Voice of Russia why British authorities call Reema’s muder ‘ordinary knife attack’ while Lee’s decapitation was perceived as an ‘act of terrorism’.

On June 4th, an 18-year old Reema Ramzan was found dead in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. The young woman died in horrendously violent circumstances: she had been repeatedly slashed with a knife, possibly a machete, and her head was severed from her body. Emergency services claimed the murder scene was among the worst they had ever witnessed; it was even worse than the brutal attack on the British Army drummer Lee Rigby who was decapitated in London’s Woolwich on May 22 by two Muslim men. Miss Ramzan’s funeral service was held yesterday with more than 400 worshippers at Bodmin Street mosque in Darnall. She was buried at Tinsley Park Cemetery.

Up until now, Miss Ramzan’s death is considered to be ‘just’ a stabbing fatality. Indeed, the mainstream British media portray Reema’s ‘execution’ as an ‘ordinary’ murder – one of a dozen man-slaughter incidents that happen in Sheffield area each year. However, what the UK new orgs fail to recognize in their articles on Miss Ramzan’s death is that she was murdered in much the same way as Lee Rigby was slaughtered in May. Neither the UK government nor the media acknowledge that the two cases are painfully alike.

Prof Kingsley asserts that the reason behind such ‘blindness’ is rooted in a profound unwillingness of the UK authorities to recognize the fact that all people have roughly equal chances of becoming the victims of terrorism. “A White Anglican UK soldier can fall prey to terrorist actions as much as a Muslim woman”, says Professor. “By analogy, a terrorist can be Muslim Shiit as much as he might be a White Anglican. Unfortunately, the British society is not ready to hold to this thought just yet. We are still living in the world of stereotypes, and by adjusting the info on Miss Ramzan’s murder to fit the current stereotypes our media is only making these prejudices worse.”

“It is extraordinary how the UK government sees Lee Rigby’s murder as a terrorist act, and Miss Ramzan’s death as a simple crime, a knife attack, while both should actually be classified as man-slaughter. By definition, terrorism must be politically motivated and this is something that is often forgotten in the modern world. Neither of these crimes was explicitly ‘political’. The two Muslim men who killed Mr Rigby acted out of hatred, much like the murderer of Miss Ramzan. Nonetheless, Lee’s murder was projected as a ‘terrorism act’ and Reema’s death as a ‘simple fatality’; and this is all because Reema was not ‘fortunate enough’ to be born as a White woman,” Professor Kingsley added.

Mr Ewan McCallum, a research fellow in the University of Dundee, has an even more radical view of the issue. According to him, UK refusal to treat Mr Rigby’s and Miss Ramzan’s murders equally, stems from “a massive, orchestrated disinformation campaign by British authorities and their allies in the media to blackout or minimize, and in many cases refuse to prosecute, anti-Muslim crimes”. Astonishingly, “the UK government is also failing to report the depth and breadth of the public fury over Miss Ramzan’s murder”, Mr McCallum continued. “If this anger was set by some left-wing cause, you’d most probably see them splashed across every TV screen in the country”.

In this sense, both McCallum and Kingsley tacitly assert that both terrorists and terrorist victims cannot and should not be divided into “us” and “them”. Much like the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said early today, “the fight against terrorism has to be consistent, the division of terrorists into “us” and “them” only exacerbates the problems. One has to see the whole picture.”

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